Bon Appetit magazine and IBM get supercomputer Watson to create all new recipes with old ingredients

IBM’s supercomputer Watson was being used to win at Jeopardy and to work on a cure for cancer. The multimillion-dollar machine is now all set to start work on your taste buds. Who could’ve thought the tech company would be of such a culinary bent! And yet, it has partnered with food magazine Bon Appetit to come up with new recipes by blending data on ingredients.
Now the odd epicure would have a hard time gauging how this works. Which is why we decided to do some research. We found, the supercomputer can taste thousands of ingredients, virtually, and deliver an instant list of ingredients and a rough set of instructions using by Bon Appetit’s 9,000-recipes strong content, “to enhance culinary creativity and discovery with cognitive computing.”

IBM is releasing a beta version of an app called Chef Watson With Bon Appetit, in partnership with the magazine. Simply hitting download will give you “entirely new recipes and gastronomic combinations that have previously never been conceived.” Bon Appetit tested some recipes using Chef Watson. With the help of the supercomputer, the curious epicures cooked up cabbage-tamarind coleslaw with fried onions, fennel-spiced ribs with apple-mustard barbecue sauce, and grilled corn and nectarine salad with chili powder, coriander, basil and cumin.

And oh, there was dessert too of course. Chef Watson knows his manners and offered a berry cobbler with lemon zest, buttermilk and sour cream. There was, however, the unusual addition of marjoram, which turned out quite the hit, according to the magazine. “At Bon Appetit, we were curious to see what Watson could discover that was never previously considered, helping unlock a chef’s creativity,” said Adam Rapoport, editor-in-chief. Looks like we can say goodbye to bad kitchen experiments already.